Doom on a Commercial Kitchen Appliance

okay okay we'll try to get doom running on this thing hey everyone it's colin how's it going you may remember this device from a previous video if you haven't watched it yet you might want to because it'll fill in a lot of the gaps for you but real quick this is basically a small pc that gets installed in restaurants and commercial kitchens that drives the monitors that tells the people who do all the cooking and meal prep and all that what orders are coming through what needs to get made that sort of thing we found out last time that this thing has some very interesting hardware specifically the cpu is kind of an soc based around the original pentium but it's got some other modern components like ddr3 ram and a video chip that's connected through pcie we didn't look too closely at the software last time but that's what we're gonna do today since that previous episode i found that a few people on twitter had actually gone out and purchased these units thankfully they got used ones just for playing around with they found these things that interesting and together we've all kind of learned some interesting stuff about these devices i'm just going to get this one hooked up and i'll show you what i mean so a screen like this is kind of where we left off last time where i just went through some of the basic options and showed you stuff we did determine that this thing runs a dos like operating system but i wasn't really sure how to get any further into it what i do know is when you plug a keyboard into the unit through ps2 it can detect that a keyboard is plugged in and will automatically open this setup screen without a keyboard attached it just goes straight into the application this one of course you can set all sorts of network settings and what type of software it's running and all that but other than this screen or the application that it automatically boots into there's really not a whole lot else you can do except we've figured out how at this screen if you hit control c you can hit y to terminate the batch job and it'll take you to a command prompt here's what's interesting this isn't ms-dos but it's also not freedos this thing runs a different version called xdos what's crazy though is i can find hardly any information about this clearly it's one of those dos derivative type of os's you know like freedos ms-dos pcdos dr dos dipdos there have been a bunch over the years and this is clearly one of them now the problem is that hbs corp or terry giron i can't find any information about them they've got a 1991 date in there obviously but i can tell you that it's a fairly small installation there's really not a whole lot going on to it and as you can see by the output of the dur command above there's really not a whole ton of files going on in this system either like if we switch to that dos folder there's just two files sys.com and ed.exe and that ed.exe is your basic text editor application and if we do something like editing the autoexec bat file it's very simple as well basically it automatically will launch sex setup that sex setup then checks for the presence of a keyboard if not found it exits itself automatically and otherwise it rolls through some other tasks one of which is really interesting to see if there's an update available i also found out a little bit more about the different customers that can use this software switch to this i don't know certified i guess is what that's short for directory you can see there's actually quite a few in here and these are all of the individual apps that this device can run based on what i guess company or point of sale system you're using and some of these i can actually kind of recognize micro is micro systems ncr national cash register you might have heard of them the one that caught my eye though was starbucks now that's all fine but barring having access to a point of sale system which i don't that kind of is the end of the line for exploring this unit now obviously i want to try and do some other fun stuff with it but this particular unit like i said in the previous video well it's on loan to me and i really can't start modifying or trying to hack it because if i break it as we also discussed last time these are quite expensive to replace so um i just went out and bought my own as you can tell they're very similar but there are some slight differences this is definitely an older model especially based on some of the button layouts and also the wear on the number one button i'm pretty sure the two have the same hardware on the inside however there are probably some other minor differences which may or may not be inconsequential but the big thing is that i was able to pick this up so i can do whatever i want with it and we're definitely going to be going on a little bit of a journey today let me show you what i found out so obviously we want to be able to try to run doom on this thing right that's what you all want and that's what i am hopefully going to be able to deliver however i think there are some options for potentially running some other stuff on here as well i've got this piece of foam that'll serve to insulate i don't really want to deal with disconnecting this keyboard membrane the pins on it are fairly tight and getting them back in there may become a bit of a pain so we took apart one of these units in that previous episode and i told you all about the parts the things that have me interested in this one are obviously this sd card slot but also one thing that i noticed is the other unit that we took apart there's a usb port that's easily accessible from the outside this particular unit doesn't have that at least not from the outside but the usb port is still there so that's an obvious revision change making the usb port accessible on the newer versions of these well they're branded oasis ipads these are commonly called bump bars i guess the idea is as they're showing the orders on screen you can press the buttons on the keypad to clear those orders out i guess the idea behind the terminology is that you're bumping the order off the screen which is why they're commonly called bump bars i guess but having access to the usb port also can open up some options but i figured the sd card slot was probably the better place to start so i built an sd card with a copy of dos on it and there's another major thing that i learned as part of those folks who were also goofing around with these on twitter let me show you what that is if you start it up while mashing f12 and you've got to be really quick you get a boot selection menu this also leads to some other interesting information specifically the bios this c bios is apparently an open source project which i didn't know that there was such a thing as an open source bios i mean i i guess but that's what these devices run the bummer is that while you can get to the boot selection menu you can't get into the bios configuration screen it's completely locked out i can't find any key commands that let you get into it i suspect the only way to actually go in and make any changes or unlock the selection screen would be to flash a different bios onto this device which is just way out of my breadth of knowledge i'm not even going to try the bummer though is because you can't change the boot order by default it always wants to boot to the spi flash disk which is the little bit of onboard flash memory soldered to the motherboard and that's what has that built in xdos installation it basically acts like a virtual floppy drive which is why that command prompt came up as a colon what's interesting though is it will see the sd card slot and treat it like an sd to ide adapter and it'll show up in the boot selection menu so in this case i've got a copy of freedos installed on that sd card and as you can see it like loads just fine the bummer is that every time you power the device on it wants to automatically boot to that built-in flash instead of the sd card so you've got to manually get into that boot selection screen every single time and tell it no no boot off of the sd card so i was starting to kind of lose patience with sd cards because i'll tell you this my ultimate goal for this whole project for our video today is not just to run doom on this i want it to be a complete soft mod i want you to be able to go up to any one of these devices and be able to run doom on it without modifying the device without having to take it apart or anything like that i think we can get there but it's clear that using the sd card slot isn't really going to be an option because it's not externally accessible plus you've got that little bit of a pain and having to get into the boot menu and you can't always hit f12 with the right timing so then you've got to keep rebooting this thing over and over to try and get that timing just right it's a little bit frustrating now let me show you what i ended up with yeah it boots straight to windows apparently the boot order is such that if you have a usb flash drive or hard drive or something plugged in that's actually higher in the priority list than the built-in flash slash virtual floppy disk it was telling me that if i wanted to plug in a ps2 mouse you know i could do so or a serial one i don't have a serial mouse even though this device has serial ports on it and i don't have one of those ps2 splitters to hook up both the keyboard and the mouse to the one ps2 port at the same time this thing sure isn't the fastest but we're at the desktop obviously very basic colors and no mouse so we're kicking it old school with navigating entirely through the keyboard now i get to remember all the key commands uh i definitely want to do alt w to turn that off um let's take a look here's a major limiting factor is this hardware was never meant to run windows 98 so drivers are gonna be a bit of a problem um if we go into system and tab over to device manager so yeah it's it's missing a mouse yeah it's that's fine um there is no display adapter it's just got the standard vga one which you kind of expect complaining about the mouse the big problem even though it sees some of the onboard hardware like it sees the two serial ports just fine um the big limiting factor is it doesn't see a plug-and-play bios where that's a limiting factor is that means no usb even though this is windows 98 second edition that is supposed to have adequate usb support so i could plug in a usb mouse it can't interrogate the bios correctly on this hardware to know what all features are available so it never sees the usb controller in the hardware the other thing that i found that's really unfortunate is if we go into my computer so you can see we've got our c drive and we've also got the floppy drive windows 98 will detect that virtual floppy drive that's the flash chip on the board the problem and i totally spaced on this earlier is windows when you access a floppy disk in windows it apparently likes to make a minor little change to the first couple sectors on the floppy disk and in the vast majority of cases this change is completely inconsequential um but in this case well i i accidentally opened up the a drive because i wanted to copy the files off of it all those like what we had seen in dos just as a backup just in case right well when i opened the a drive it made that little update and um well if you uh go and reboot and i'm going to let it go ahead and try to start up like normal yeah windows kind of bricked it this unit is permanently stuck at the booting from floppy screen now because apparently those first couple sectors on the disk actually do matter at least when it comes to x-dos basically i think windows overwrote the little bit that tells the a drive it is bootable so conceivably this could get fixed i could boot this thing into dos reformat the a drive make it bootable and then copy all the files back onto it i just haven't done it yet but yeah windows just totally nuked this thing so now i have no choice but to boot from some other media so the next os that made the most sense to me at least was windows xp but before i got too deep into it i wanted to do some research to see if it was even possible if i would end up with the same driver compatibility or lack lack thereof rather with this hardware under xp as i did with 98. i learned something really interesting so we talked last time that the cpu and graphics chipset are manufactured by a company called dm and p what's interesting is that the same cpu and graphics chip are sold on a board called the 86 duino it's meant to be kind of an embedded computing board more to be like a more powerful arduino a raspberry pi kind of replacement that sort of thing not so much just a small general purpose pc but i did discover that the 86 duino in addition to linux and a bunch of other open source os's it does support windows xp and you can even download a driver pack for that board from the manufacturer's website what's also interesting the 86 duino it's owned by dm p so the company that made the chips on this board also make another board that's very similar in architecture and offers drivers for it so the gears got turning in my head and i figured all right i can get xp installed on this because chances are the drivers would work fine boy did i have problems with that i figured booting from usb and installing the usb was going to be the easiest thing just because of what we talked about with kind of the frustrations of dealing with the sd card so i made a bootable usb installer for windows xp i'll include the links to the tools i use down in the description in case you want to be crazy like me and try to do the same thing the initial parts of it worked fine i was able to boot into setup get the setup actually started the text mode portion of the xp install went through without a hitch but when i got into the graphical portion of the setup after the first reboot it just kept throwing tons and tons of problems my way lots of files that it either couldn't copy or had errors when trying to copy it through a warning about limited virtual memory and then it just started blue screening it just didn't want to finish the installation so i'm like okay well maybe there's something with usb like trying to install from a usb flash drive to itself yeah the tools you can use to make bootable xp installers are kind of a hack because that's not a way that xp was ever meant to be installed from way back when it came out so i went super simple and discovered that usb hubs will actually work with this hardware as well so i plugged in a powered usb hub and an external usb cd-rom drive and broke out one of my standard xp installed disks and then tried installing to either the usb flash drive or the sd card just to see if maybe the installation method was a factor i still ended up with lots of problems installing from the cd-rom drive to the sd card took about forever it threw a couple of errors it wasn't a huge deal except when it went to reboot for the first time in the graphical setup it just straight up blue screen and just wouldn't go anywhere i know it is possible to install windows xp on this specific hardware the oasis ipad because one of my twitter followers who bought one of these was able to do it and there's obviously some steps that i'm missing or maybe there's something different in the revision of hardware that i have and they have that's throwing this thing for a loop i can't say for sure but after a lot of time screwing around trying to get xp installed i decided to throw in the towel then i got to thinking okay well you know xp doesn't work because it is kind of a hack to install through usb and all that kind of stuff what about something like vista or windows 7 so i made up a windows 7 install usb i couldn't even get it to boot windows pe and i'll include a link to a video that kind of explains all about windows pe and the struggles of trying to install newer os's on older hardware it basically 128 megabytes of ram is not enough to even start the installer for windows 7 when booted from a usb flash drive there may be a way that i can clone a full windows 7 setup to a usb flash drive also i learned during that whole xp install saga that this cpu tends to run kind of hot i think this is more about like the way this product was designed to normally work instead of worst case scenario but when you put this thing back together the thermal pad doesn't actually touch anything the ribbon cable for the membrane gets in the way you would think that oh the top of this would touch the you know stainless steel casing and the casing would act like a heat sink um no nope it's just this thing is the only form of cooling for that soc at all maybe there's some mods that can be done to help improve that but a little bit of a design oversight if you ask me all right enough screwing around let's finish what we set out to do soft modding this thing to play doom i figured it out and i'm not even going to do it on this hardware i'm going to do it on the other one just as proof that it is possible with an unmodified one of these units conceivably you could walk up to any one of these and as long as it's got the usb port that's accessible on the end this will work also because we know that this thing supports usb hubs you can conceivably use a usb keyboard with it i'm just going to keep using the ps2 adapter because i find that easier but you could get like a keyboard that has a usb hub built into it and plug your flash drive into that and then you would just have one cable to plug into this device in order to do this i'm going to call it the soft mod i'm sure some of you are going to argue with me but i've got another usb flash drive here i don't get this whole device banana business but this is ms-dos 622 a full install of ms-dos 622 and i have the doom installer copied to it so let's go for it i believe it did use that as drive c now we'll just go into doom [Music] this is the shareware version i should mention just to make things easier i'm sure it'll run the full version just fine one thing that i do have to give a little bit of a caveat to i really really wanted to be able to get the membrane buttons on here to control the game but i'm pretty sure these are connected through gpio and i have no idea what would be involved in like writing a driver or whatever to have the gpio input mimic either a keyboard or a joystick or something like that so unfortunately you do have to use an external keyboard in order to control the game i know i'm disappointed too but it does work in this case there is no sound which is the other major limiting factor to this hardware and why i just can't recommend it if you want to have some sort of weird retro dos gaming device there is no built-in audio and there's no way to add it there's no expansion cards or anything like that so all the best you can get really is just the pc speaker um so i have to say no music and on this one just pc speaker but save parameters and launch doom you bet yeah rock on check it and you even get all the pc speaker boops and beeps is they actually don't sound too horrible if you ask me but i mean it's totally controllable right as it should but yeah i mean this is totally playable i'm actually surprised at how playable this is i mean granted it it sucks that there's no music or real good sound effects or anything but the frame rate seems to be you know surprisingly high like just moving around and everything it's surprisingly smooth i think the graphics chipset is limited to resolution of like 1024 by 768 or something like that get over here thank you [Music] but uh yeah there you go we're playing doom on a kitchen appliance maybe there's more that can be done with this hardware i definitely think that there's tinkering left to do but i just kind of ran out of time i didn't want to spend too much on just this one thing to keep coming up with dead end after dead end you can understand that gets really frustrating but i'm really happy that i was able to get this thing all put together and it was actually surprisingly easy so again i'll include links to a lot of the tools and processes that i followed to build like the bootable usb flash drive with dos on it the xp one the windows 98 one like the sd card and stuff um if you wanna follow along or maybe they're useful if you find another similar embedded device i can't say for sure because the hardware is kind of all over the place but if anything maybe they'll help you on your own weird hardware retro gaming quest anyway if you like this one i would appreciate a thumbs up be sure to subscribe you can follow me on twitter and instagram this does not comp and as always thanks for watching [Music] uh

Channel: This Does Not Compute

Views: 200,523

Keywords:

Id: 8fSdLKx5HlU

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CyanKing64]

Not my own work. This was all done by This Does Not Compute and he shows how to do it in his video. Skip to 20:39 to see it running

[u/PepperbroniFrom2B]

the title lol

[u/englandgreen]

Colin (This does not Compute) runs a great channel!

[u/PMPeetaMellark]

Sorry honey, the thanksgiving turkey is well… doom.